The misbegotten coup d’état of August 19–21, 1991, whisked the rug out from under Gorbachev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet state. It was sprung by the conservatives with whom he had aligned himself in 1990–91 and was timed to forestall the signing of the union treaty. Confining Gorbachev to his summer residence at Foros, Crimea, the eight principals inundated Moscow with armor (about 750 tanks and vehicles) and troops, declared Gennadii Yanayev acting president, and appointed themselves a Public Committee for the State of Emergency, a condition they promulgated for a period of six months. As Yeltsin observed in
The worst oversights were vis-à-vis the born leader who was president of Russia. The fumbling plotters had puzzled at length about Gorbachev but gave little thought to Yeltsin or to his Russian administration. In February 1991, after Yeltsin’s public demand for Gorbachev to resign, a KGB colonel contacted Pavel Voshchanov, a journalist who accompanied Yeltsin on the U.S. trip in 1989, to ask for a meeting with Yeltsin to discuss how he and Yanayev could work together “to save the country.” Voshchanov took the message to Yeltsin, who said, “Let’s see what they are going to do, but we will not have any contact with this hoodlum
Yeltsin had been to see Nazarbayev for talks in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, since August 16. Acting on a premonition, he delayed his return on Sunday, August 18, by four hours (he swam in a mountain stream and attended a concert). He had the pilots land at Kubinka, a military field some miles out of Moscow. Had they put down wheels as scheduled at Vnukovo airport, he said in an interview, he would have been arrested and shot by order of Kryuchkov, and the violence used as cover for a nationwide wave of repression. The claim about a plan to shoot him is not made in Yeltsin’s memoir account and seems implausible.75 A post-coup inquiry turned up evidence that KGB officials intended to divert his aircraft to another landing strip, at Chkalovsk, and to detain him there for a conversation with Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov and then “negotiations with the Soviet leadership.” At Kryuchkov’s direction, Viktor Grushko, his first deputy, chaired a meeting on this stratagem at one P.M. on August 17, in which Deputy Defense Minister Vladislav Achalov made it clear that force would have to be used, but, because of uncertainty about Yeltsin’s reaction, was unable to pull the others along. “After the landing [at Chkalovsk], the chief of the airport, on the pretense of delays on the part of those welcoming [the travelers], was to invite B. N. Yeltsin into another room, where Yazov would talk with him. In the course of the meeting, Achalov said that paratroopers and the Alpha Unit [of the KGB] would have to neutralize the guard of the RSFSR president, so as to exclude undesirable excesses such as taking a stand or the use of weapons. Since the participants in the meeting were unable to come to conclusions
